Building distributed architecture with traditional infrastructure is a cumbersome process. Maintaining a single data center provides risk to business. If the systems fail, services running on them will also fail. IT administrators use highly distributed, fault-tolerant architectures to mitigate risks using running servers and networks located in geographically isolated data centers.

With cloud, Vogels said a reliable, distributed system “becomes relatively easy.” In Amazon’s case, their data centers are backed up in multiple places each with multiple availability zones to mitigate outage and risk like natural disasters. If one system fails, your service will still be available through Amazon API.

Vogels linked most data centers as a castle with a moat to protect it. Vogels said, “As the castle starts growing and growing, as happens with most enterprises, it becomes much harder to protect what’s inside the castle.”

Cloud computing as an alternative provides right security model and offers an end-to-end security guarantee for each application and keep them distinct from one another.

Amazon is investing lots of money in cloud security and it is a number one priority for them as stated by Vogels. Amazon’s application level tools help customers to protect from external cloud threats.

On Demand Scaling in Cloud

On demand scaling of on-premises database cluster and applications require more planning, more server setup and configuration, tuning, and testing. This is also costly affair and takes time to architect and to scale quickly.

Supercomputers and expensive and are limited to handful of elite enterprises who use them. They are mostly used only for the highest value jobs.

By using cloud, Amazon says AWS built world’s 42nd fastest computer in the world and made it available and affordable for everyone.

Representative of Cycle Computing that uses Amazon cloud services highlights the power of supercomputing. Cycle Computing uses AWS supercomputing capacity to handle their business. The company built a 50,000 core supercomputer with AWS compute capacity to test potential cancer drugs for the pharmaceutical research firm Schrodinger. By using cloud services, the system delivered 12 years worth of calculations (to process on a single core) in three hours at an affordable cost of $4828.85 an hour.

Cloud Drives Innovation

Cloud lets you do experiments quickly and leverage the tremendous power cloud technologies. If the experiment doesn’t work, it will save you much time and money, as Vogels makes the solid point, “experiment often and fail early.”

Big Data with Big Clouds

Storing of massive volumes of data need huge data warehouse setup and are quite expensive to invest in server clusters to process the data.

With a cloud mobile ecosystem, mobile apps developers can use tools like Simplegeo, Panda, Echo, Social Grid, Twilio, Animoto and others to build app quicker and easier and make them available through Amazon’s new marketplace.